Solaris, Linux, tape drives, and large files

[Matt McLeod]

Here's a fun one:

Have a couple of tape drives which were attached to Sun workstations.
They've been moved to a Linux box (the RH6.0 system I've mentioned
before).

I've run into two problems:

* when doing backups over the network, the Linux box reports a write
error at the end of the tape, rather than an end-of-tape message.
So ufsdump aborts rather than offlining the tape so the next one
is loaded...

(same applies to tar, both Sun and GNU, running on the workstation)

* when trying to do the backup locally on the Linux machine (i.e.,
mount the fs on the workstation which has the dumps on it, then
use tar or cpio to stick that on tape), the end-of-tape thing works
OK, but one of the files is a bit over 2G, and so none of the Linux
utilities seems able to read it.

A workaround to either of these would do the trick. Haven't been
able to find any mention of reading large files on Linux in the
howtos and whatnot.

Matt

--
Mistakes are often the stepping stones to utter failure.